Marketing Team

The Marketing Team is probably one of the most diverse teams at OpenClassrooms. For starters, its name should be "Marketing and Communication Team", or "Marcomm Team", but we refer to it as the "Marketing Team" in our everyday language.

The Marketing Team focuses on B2C (Business To Consumer). They are the ones who talk the most with our end users, whether it's a student in their 20s or someone changing careers in their 40s.

Who works in the team? What are their roles? How do they work together and with other teams? Which software applications do they use? Do they seriously use at least one jargon acronym like SEO/SMO/CPC in every sentence? 😜

The Marketing Team now has ten people in it and is still growing. New jobs are being created, along with new responsibilities. Bear in mind that this chapter will be updated as the team matures.

Mission

The Marketing Team's mission is to ensure our end users know about our educational offer and understand the options available, as well as optimizing their experience after signing up.

This mission is quite broad. Let's break it down:

Reach new potential customers: whether it's through inbound or outbound marketing (people contacting us or us contacting them), we want people to find out more about us. To make this happen, we need to write content, host events, display ads, etc.

Analyse our user's behavior: why do some people subscribe and pay immediately, while others do not? Who should we target first? Which message is more relevant, and when? There's some big data scientist stuff going on here. 🤓

Give support to our customers: once people have signed up, we want them to be happy customer. It's not, "Great, we've got your money now, thanks, bye", but rather, "Now that you're a customer, we are responsible for your user experience, and we won't fail the trust you're giving us 😤 ".

This is just a short summary of what the team does, we hope you have a better idea of what's going on now! If not, don't worry, we'll dive into more detail in the rest of the chapter.

Roles

Ten people work in the Marketing Team. What roles do they have? Let's find out!

Community Management: OpenClassrooms has a big community. Our roots are the community. No wonder that this is one of the oldest roles here at OpenClassrooms! We have to ensure great communication and trust through different channels, whether it's through social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN...), forums, chat, etc. There's a lot of activity going on!

Customer Support: we receive several hundred messages a day. They come from many people: premium users of course, but also free users and even users who don't have an account yet. We prioritize helping our paying customers of course, but we do answer everyone as fast as we can.

Growth Hackers: yes, we have data. Lots of data. "Big data". But we need to make sense of it. Understand which messages work best, where and when. These are the people who attract potential customers (by using Facebook ads for instance), analyze their behavior and suggest changes to the product. As you can imagine, our growth hackers are also data scientists. From what we can tell, they are looking for some kind of holy "hockey stick curve". It makes you wonder whether they are hockey fans... or if there's something else to it. 🤔

Student Advisors: they reach out to people who are the most likely to become customers, to give the right training advice. They make and receive a lot of calls, explain our offers and help people get started. Where possible, they also give advice on how people can get funding for their vocational training. The vast majority of our students end up following a State-endorsed path with a Premium Plus account.

Remember, because the team is currently growing, further roles will appear in the future. Check back here to get the updates!

Who's The Boss?

Sébastien leads the Marketing Team. He has comprehensive experience in marketing at other internet companies. In fact, he's currently doing many roles that aren't yet filled in marketing and communication, while helping find the right people to do the job at the same time!

The team work closely together, however people tend to be pretty autonomous, so they only ask for Sébastien's input when they have a customer problem they don't know how to handle.

Meetings

The Marketing Team has a weekly standup meeting every Tuesday. Like the Tech Team, the idea is to keep this meeting very short, which is why it's a standup meeting. Each member of the team discusses what they've been doing, what they're going to do and any problems they have encountered, so that everyone is aware of eachother's activity and can offer support or advice.

Apart from this, the Marketing Team has no formal meetings. A weekly update meeting is currently being created. We'll change this section as soon as our detectives have found more evidence of it. 🕵

Software

Here is a quick overview of the software applications used by the team on a regular basis. These are not all used by everyone - programs used depend on a person's role in the Marketing Team.

Amplitude

Whenever a user is created, updates some data or does something important, this information is stored in Amplitude for further analysis.

Amplitude enables us to analyze our data easily

Amplitude is a great tool to observe behavior. It can create useful graphs in a matter of seconds. For instance, you can create a graphic on the number of users who signed up in the last 30 days, or the last 12 months, then break them down by spoken language. No problem!

It can build funnels, for example to help visualize where people get lost when they intend to become Premium. It also lets you analyze retention: how long do they remain Premium? How often do they come back?This helps us to decide how the product should be updated.

Everyone at OpenClassrooms has access to Amplitude. The Education Team, for instance, uses it to understand why some courses have more success than others.The Marketing Team remains the biggest user of Amplitude though, especially growth hackers. 📈

Periscope

Periscope is quite similar to Amplitude, and we use it to design custom dashboards. Creating a dashboard is reserved for people who have a solid experience in SQL, but viewing them is intended to be easy for everyone.

Periscope Data helps us to create customised dashboards

Periscope has the advantage of being much more customisable than Amplitude, once you've configured it. You will see increasingly useful dashboards on Periscope, which will give you useful information, such as the most successful courses or where paying customers come from, etc.Be sure to keep an eye on it!

Zendesk

When it comes to customer support, Zendesk is our tool of choice! This is where we recieve our hundreds and thousands of messages. We also use Zendesk Voice to handle phone calls.

The Customer Support advisors spend most of their days using Zendesk.

Zendesk is the home of our customer support people

Hubspot

The Marketing Team is getting started with Hubspot to do inbound marketing (the idea is to attract customers through great content) and automated marketing (sending messages based on specific behavior):

We use Hubspot for marketing

We're currently implementing Hubspot in the Marketing Team.

Customer.io

We use Customer.io to automate marketing messages, mostly through email. Previously, this is something we would have had to add in the code, which is time consuming for everyone. Here, we can say: "Hey, if someone is approaching the end of his premium account, inform him 7 days before renewal", or "Congratulations, you got your course certificate!".

We use Customer.io to automate messages that are being sent out

Sprout Social

When it comes to social media, we need to have an overview of what's happening! That's why we use Sprout Social.

Sprout Social helps us to see what's happening and to reply quickly, whether the message came from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, Instagram...

Sprout Social helps us to see what people are saying... and to answer them

MakeMeReach

Our growth hackers rely a lot on advertising on social media. To help us, we use MakeMeReach, a tool that can duplicate campaigns, regroup them and adapt them to different targets. This has become very useful for us!

MakeMeReach eases the pain when we have to manage multiple ads

Satismeter

We've been following customer satisfaction for quite a long time at OpenClassrooms. We've come up with an easy and satisfying way to measure satisfaction : NPS (Net Promoter Score).

First, we ask our users if they would recommend OpenClassrooms, on a scale from 0 (no, not at all) to 10 (yes, definitely). People who vote 9 or 10 are considered promoters, those who vote 7 or 8 "fence sitters" (they hesitate), and from 0 to 6 detractors.

We then work out the difference between your promoters and detractors and get your Net Promoter Score. For instance, if you have 50% promoters, 20% fence sitters (we won't count them) and 30% detractors, you would have a NPS of 50 - 30 = 20.

How NPS is calculated

Your NPS can be from -100 (everyone hates you) to 100 (everyone loves you). In the industry, globally, the average is an NPS of 20-30. Some financial services get very negative scores, -30 or less. The best companies, like Apple, can sometimes score as high as 70!

At OpenClassrooms, we use Satismeter to track our user satisfaction. Our NPS is usually in the range of 68-70, which is very high! 😍

Satismeter shows user satisfaction by calculating our NPS

We're lucky to have such a high NPS (we heard from Satismeter that it was the highest they've seen!).

We go beyond these vanity numbers though and pay a lot of attention to the comments our users leave after the survey (a few of them give detailed comments). This helps us make more informed decisions about the product.